Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  No two people could be more different than he and I. He has the most exact and capacious memory I have ever encountered, while I can remember hardly anything but people and feelings; he is a fiend for detail, while I am sloppy; he has this instinctive understanding of money and what can be done with it—the structure of a company, the financing of a new enterprise, are things which he can grasp at once without any previous experience—while to me the simplest contract is sterile: words on paper which I can understand if I concentrate but which have no implications beyond the mere statement, none of which I can criticize in relation to a set of ideas. André has the sometimes blinkered driving force of the obsessive, to whom his own ends are both necessary and right. I have the detachment of the disassociated, always prepared to believe that the other side of the question may have something in it. Above all, André is active, he compels things to happen, while I am passive, I accept. It is easier for me to see what I have gained from our long partnership than it is to understand why he values it.

  As soon as the war was over, André formed his company: Allan Wingate, it was called, we picked the name out of a hat in the belief that ‘Deutsch’ would still meet with prejudice. I had to round off my work at the B.B.C. and then took a three-months holiday at Beckton, so I did not join him until 1946 and cannot exactly remember how the absurdly small capital was raised. It was little more than three thousand pounds. Part of it, I know, came from a man who made handbags, who liked books and who had sized up André as a young man who would go far. Printers, binders, and papermakers reached the same conclusion, allowing him generous credit and taking extraordinary trouble to be helpful. Partly they were charmed, for André is capable of exerting great charm, and partly they were convinced, because absolute conviction breeds conviction. It is fortunate that André is by inclination honest, for if he were a liar he would be one of those mesmeric pathological liars whose fabrications dupe everyone for years, simply because such liars believe in them themselves.

  Our first office was two rooms, a passage, a w.c. and a box-room with a skylight next to the w.c. in which sat a sequence of morose little men who did our accounts. That they were morose was not surprising. The chief thing that I remember about those first few years was the agony of bills coming in: the agony of paying them when we had to, and the agony of not paying them when we could get away with it. There is at all times a sum without which, the pontiffs say, you cannot launch a publishing house. It stood in those days at fifteen thousand pounds—five times what André had been able to raise—and stands today at fifty thousand. At any period I am sure that this sum can safely be halved by anyone prepared to work hard, while by fanatics it can probably be quartered. But in cutting it by five we had gone too near the knuckle. What was to happen later could still have been avoided, but the need to avoid it would not have arisen if we had begun with more capital.

  Meanwhile, in spite of money worries, we enjoyed ourselves. We made a few mistakes, published one or two of those handsome editions on handmade paper, illustrated with woodcuts by expensive artists and bound in buckram, which few people can resist producing when they first get their hands on the means of book-making and which never earn their keep. But for the most part we managed, thanks to André’s vigilance over every halfpenny, to produce our books at an economic price, and we succeeded, after great difficulties, in organizing their distribution on the right lines. That our overheads should have been unnecessarily high by as little as a pound would have shocked us all: ‘Have you switched off your fire?’ ‘Why are you using a new envelope for this, don’t you know what stickers are for?’ We kept our stock in the passage leading to the w.c. where a narrow bench had been installed, and there, just before a publication date, the whole firm would stand, working away with sticky paper and string, under the benevolent eye of our real packer, Mr Brown.

  Mr Brown would always have to accompany whoever it was who was making the London deliveries in André’s small car, because only a Union member could hand a parcel of books to another Union member. I used to enjoy my turn on deliveries, listening to a gentle burble of London lore, for Mr Brown, a compulsive talker, prided himself that he knew every inch of the city, and so he did. His interpretations of what he knew were sometimes eccentric, museums becoming cathedrals, and monuments commemorating events that had happened or people who had existed long after they were erected. Strange things went on in Mr Brown’s London, too: men in Islington bit off the heads of rats for a shilling, and there was a building near Westminster Cathedral full of holy images covered with blood—‘You know, all Christ and bloody Mary and that.’ When I asked him how he knew, he told me that he had once spent a whole night there, packing singlehanded to oblige, and that all these images with the blood on them had got him down so much that he didn’t half let out a yell when the bishop came in at three o’clock in the morning to offer him a glass of wine. ‘Wine, that’s what he called it, but if you ask me it wasn’t nothing of the kind.’ When I laughed and said, ‘Do you mean that he was trying to poison you?’ he answered, ‘Well, I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that,’ but in a doubtful voice. And then, he said, when morning came, a great many women arrived, all dressed in black from top to toe, and all of them crying as though heartbroken. Mr Brown often left his stories hanging at a point like that, but I was so disturbed by all these sad, black-clad women that I persuaded him to explain them. ‘Well, they was all rank Catholics, you see,’ he said, ‘and some old cardinal had kicked the bucket. I tried to jolly them along, I did. You wouldn’t see me taking on like that, I said, not for him anyway, he’s just another man to me. Cor, they didn’t half think me a vile man.’

  Mr Brown called me by my first name, but I would have felt it impertinent to have addressed him by his—André was the only person who ever did. He was a fatherly man, and kind, although his kindness could be disconcerting. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t hold with giving up my seat in a bus to a young girl, she’s as fit to stand as I am, only when she’s having her monthly I will.’ ‘But Mr Brown, how can you tell?’ ‘Tell? I can always tell. Tell at a glance with the lot of you, I can.’ The intimacy of a small business is certainly no myth.

  The firm prospered, in that the books coming its way became better and that we were selling the right number of them, but in publishing money goes out fast and comes in slowly, and we had no margin. Every now and then the bills would heap up beyond the danger point and something would have to be done. There would be a short period of blank despair when we faced the fact that none of us knew anyone with money, and then André would pick up a scent. Someone, it would turn out, did know someone who had heard of someone who had always wanted an interest in a publishing firm (once it was a manufacturer of lavatory seats). I have learnt by now that there is always someone about who wants such an interest, but in those days it used to seem a miracle. Meetings would be arranged, friendships would flare up, and a new director, more or less active as the case might be, would appear on the Board.

  The trouble with directors recruited by André in this way—and at our peak we had six of them—was that they thought of themselves, not unreasonably, as directors, while we thought of them as stooges. I had no official finger in the pie at that time, being only an employee, not a partner, but because I knew André so well and had been working with him almost from the beginning, I was his close ally, no more willing than he was to see anyone else in control of a firm so essentially his own. Only the last man to join the Board had any practical experience of publishing, and none of them had anything like André’s flair, eye for detail, or capacity for hard work.

  André had been drawn to England by a romantic conception of it, and this he still retained. Confront him with an Hungarian goose and he would see it for what it was, but his English geese always began as swans. This led him into the folly of agreeing to ‘a gentleman’s agreement’ instead of to a service agreement when we reached the ticklish point at which one of the infiltrating directors acquired fifty-one
percent of the shares in the company: the words ‘a gentleman’s agreement’ sounded to André so much more British. That such an agreement should work when the other party, although having financial control, was expected to play the role of office boy (as he plaintively remarked) was a vain hope.

  Tact was needed: tact, restraint, easygoing dispositions on both sides, and equal or complementary abilities all round. These conditions were lacking. The firm, while becoming outwardly more prosperous every day, deteriorated into a state of guerrilla warfare. I blush for us now, when I remember the spirit with which we entered into it, but I still cannot see how either André or I could have continued to work with any pleasure or profit except on his terms.

  After five years of hard work we had moved our office to a charming house in Knightsbridge; we had published some good and successful books; we were making a profit; we were at home in our trade: and there we sat in our office (all right, we would have acknowledged crossly, the money was not ours but without us there would have been no office at all) in what, by the last painful weeks of a painful year, amounted to a state of siege.

  During that year tempers had worn quite away. One of our directors would draft a contract and André, always quick to scent danger, would pick it off his desk. ‘Are you mad?’ he would cry—and that the oversight he had spotted was a grave one did not make his intervention more acceptable. Another of them would write a blurb and I would take it upstairs and rewrite it without consulting him. That his version was embarrassing, and that he would not have agreed to alter it if I had asked him, did not prevent my action from being high-handed. And in the usual way, inexperience and ineptitude became clumsier for being jumped on, so that the jumping daily seemed more necessary. Soon we had reached the point of dissecting each other’s characters with morbid relish behind each other’s backs, then of rival factions taking each other out for a drink in attempts at conciliation, only to come back to the office with new foibles to dissect. One of our directors wept easily after his third drink. He did not seem to notice it, but tears would spill out of his round blue eyes and smear his broad face as he catalogued the insults he had received. I would feel sorry for him and for a moment would really believe that I was discussing ways of improving our relationship, but all the time I was watching this extraordinary spectacle with secret glee, ready to caricature it as soon as André and I were alone together. I doubt whether unhappy marriages bring out the worst in people any more surely than unhappy business partnerships.

  The frightening thing about a situation such as this one is that when recriminations begin about recent events, two people, each absolutely convinced that he is speaking the truth, will advance two opposite versions of a conversation or a happening. When that point has been reached no intermediary—and several were called in—can bridge the gap. Once meetings start being held in lawyers’ offices, you might as well give up.

  We did not give up until everyone was shut in his separate room, communicating only through secretaries. At that point André had to allow himself to admit that he had no choice: the other man had financial control, André did not have a service agreement, ‘gentleman’ was a word that could hardly have been applied to any of us at that moment—we were beaten.

  I cannot remember where it was that André and I sat down to digest the fact, but I have an impression that there was a table between us, with white cups on it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what do we do now?’ We looked at each other and it was hardly necessary to speak the words. There was nothing we could possibly do but start another publishing firm.

  That André should have had no doubts about this was only natural, but that I should have felt as he did suggests that I had become, if not a career woman, at least a woman who had found a career. And so, I suppose, I had. I would have preferred, and I would still prefer, not to have to work for my living in an office, but if I must, then a publisher’s office is the one to be in. The formation and progress of the new firm, in which our friend Nicolas Bentley and I became and remained the only working directors beside André, is a story to be kept in reserve in case André should one day want to write it, but if I am ever to say what I like about the game, I should be able to say it now.

  Book X is not so good as Book Y. Books A, B, and C have good reasons for their existence but do not happen to interest me. Books D and E—God knows what we were thinking of when we took those on, they will both flop and they deserve to flop. Book F is embarrassing—I do not like it, I do not think it good, but it will make a lot of money and it is not actually pernicious. But books G, H, I, J, and K: now there are books with which I am pleased to have been concerned, there are voices which deserve to be heard; and somewhere among them are my darlings, the books—not many of them, for in no generation are there many such writers—the books which, I believe, had to exist. This is why I like the work, and this is why other people in publishing like it, although some of them choose to affect a ‘hard-headed-businessman’ attitude and say at cocktail parties things like ‘I never read books’ or ‘I can’t stand writers.’ If a publisher does not have a good head for business either on his own shoulders or on his partner’s, he is a poor publisher, but if a good head for business were all he had, he would be making detergents or shoes or furnishing fabrics, not books.

  Apart from that it is a job which suits me because it has a constant element of extemporization in it, if not lunacy. Its nature forbids the hardening of its arteries into routine. This often makes me bilious with rage, or sullen, or reckless: I long fiercely to know what it would be like to do work in which I could start something and be sure that I could carry it through to the end uninterrupted. But against that, I am not often bored.

  I used to have a dream of a pretty office. When I became a director, I imagined, I would acknowledge the fact that the greater part of my waking life is spent at work and I would have a room which gave me pleasure, with a wide enough desk, a comfortable chair, decorative objects on the shelves, colours I enjoyed on the walls, pictures and plants. For several weeks I relished the thought of this room, but the day I moved into it was the last day it looked pretty. A meticulously neat person—our third partner, Nicolas Bentley, for instance—can keep paper at bay, but not someone as untidy and lacking in method as myself, and while most work involves paper, mine produces things made of it as well. How does one control paper? Letters and copies of letters not yet filed because I must be reminded to do something about them; a layout pad, and loose sheets from it with rough sketches on them; periodicals and cuttings from periodicals; memoranda on the backs of used envelopes; lists of publication dates, of contracts signed, of changes in the prices of books, of advertising space bought, of people to invite to a party, of other people to whom complimentary copies are to be sent; samples of paper for book jackets or text; typescripts and synopses; reports on typescripts and synopses; proofs, both in galley and in page; roughs submitted by an artist for a jacket, or the finished art work roosting with me so that I remember to telephone the artist about a correction: a perpetual autumn sheds its paper leaves, heaping them on to my desk, drifting them into piles on my floor so that I cannot push my chair back without tumbling them. My reference books can never be dusted because of the paper lying on top of them and when I want my ruler, my scissors, or my india-rubber, my hands grope into the drifts on my desk and sheets of paper, unsettled, flutter to join the paper on the floor. Only outsize matchboxes and bumper tins of rubber solution are any good to me. The smaller sizes would submerge with the bottles of coloured ink, the roll of Scotch tape, and the pretty lustre shell which holds my paper clips. Only my type-gauge usually remains above paper, because if I cannot see it out of the corner of my eye I grow hysterical.

  A type-gauge is a thin metal ruler marked with the units of measurements for type: twelve points to a pica; an eleven-point em is this long— the type area of this page is twenty-four picas wide. The type in which this page is set is an eleven-point type, and there are four additional points of space betwee
n the lines. The type-gauge is one of the tools of the typographer and has no business on an editorial desk. But our firm, although it is growing too big to be called a small firm, still feels like one; not so long ago any of us might have had to turn our hand to anything, and we have got into the habit of it. Because I can draw after a fashion and enjoy problems of design, I was the one to whom it fell to lay out advertisements, through which I came to know enough to lay out a book if I had to, and to design odd jobs such as leaflets and showcards, and to criticize other people’s designs. Nowadays, if the production department is overloaded, it will be to me that any overspill of designing comes. It is in this part of the work that one comes nearest to the actual making of a book as a physical object, that one learns something of the printer’s, binder’s, and blockmaker’s problems. It is here that the element of craftsmanship comes in. Because this, like all making, is fascinating, my type-gauge has become a symbol of being a bookmaker as distinct from being a seller of books and an assessor of the merits of a writer’s work, and of the three activities the making is the most comforting, the most sane in its procedures and dependable in its consequences.